"Gladly Lerne, Gladly Teche" is the personal web log of John V. Fleming, the Louis W. Fairchild Professor of English and Comparative Literature emeritus at Princeton University. It continues in its title and its spirit his one-time newspaper column in The Daily Princetonian. As a general rule a new post is mounted every Wednesday morning (EST).

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

In the Midst of Life...

Ruby Dixon Fleming with grand-parental bloguiste

The past week has been a crowded one, its high point being
of course the birth of Ruby Dixon Fleming at Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn
about 7:30 in the evening of Saturday, November 24. An event of such magnitude as to cause a palpable tremor in
the earth’s crust demanded at the very least the brief “Extra” of Gladly Lerne, Gladly Teche that I posted
on Sunday. One of the poems I
memorized as a child is Longfellow’s “Psalm of Life”, now sadly neglected with the rest of the work of that fine poet.
Its most famous lines are probably these:

Lives of great men all remind us

We can make our lives sublime,

And, departing, leave behind us

Footprints on the sands of time.

Looking at little Ruby’s identification certificate it
suddenly occurred to me that this great woman was not about to wait for her departure to leave her
footprints. It was practically the
first thing she did.

Ruby’s
birth was the apex of this family’s week, but there were other exhilarating
heights, one of which was the preparation, by yours truly, of the perfect Thanksgiving turkey. Let no reader be offended that I thus
mingle matters of greater and lesser import; the bird weighed exactly twice as
much as the baby. If you are lucky enough to live in a family that includes
some kosher-keepers, some vegans, and some Anglo-Saxon carnivores, the
preparation of large holiday meals presents a special challenge in the creation of a multiple choice menu.
It might have been easier to bag a wild turkey in Washington’s Crossing
Park than to track down the penultimate Tofurky in central Jersey, which I
eventually succeeded in doing at the Shop Rite in Montgomery Township.

Tofurky: the vegan's sweetbreads: "It isn't sweet, and it isn't bread, and I'll be damned if I'll eat it," she said.

A good deal of what I know derives from the erudite group of early-morning athletes with
whom I share a rank of lockers in Dillon Gym. Among them is this really nice, smart guy named Steve who happened
to be talking, a few days before Thanksgiving, about the virtues of brining the holiday bird. I had never even heard of it, but I
leapt into the epistemological void and did it—in a big old ceramic pickling
vat that for the last five decades has done nothing more noble than cool beer and soft
drinks. To about a gallon of heavy
brine I added two or three quarts of apple juice, covered the whole thing with a
couple of bags of ice, and left it in the outdoor cool for about
thirty hours. The result was the
first really moist, succulent turkey in family memory.

The
two miracles, the seven-pound one and the fourteen-pound one, were not
unrelated. Katie Dixon, the
unflappable mother of Ruby Dixon Fleming, partook heartily of the Thanksgiving
turkey. She then went for a
lengthy and fairly strenuous walk, which involved dodging or clambering over
numerous arboreal victims of the recent hurricane, along the side of the
canal. Next day, after a good
night’s sleep, she drove back to Red Hook, whence on the next day, Saturday,
she drove over to the hospital in Park Slope in the morning and gave birth to a
miracle-child in the evening. As
for the theme of giving thanks, it is perhaps too obvious to mention.

Literary
theory is not a recent invention.
It is only incomprehensible
literary theory that is new. What
many of the ancient Latin rhetoricians like Quintillian and Cicero taught was
common sense only partially disguised by its geeky, Greeky polysyllables. They taught, for example, that
two particularly important parts of a composition were the beginning and the
end, initiation and termination.
What is true of poetry may also be true of human life itself. Certainly it was for me this past week.

In
an earlier post I mentioned having gone to Wales to visit a very old and dear
friend from my college days in Oxford.
His name was Owen Roberts.
Though overtaken while still in late youth by multiple sclerosis, he
became one of the premier Welsh-language journalists of his generation. His career in television was marked by
a notable variety and an unvarying success. No man’s life
is adequately summarized by a professional curriculum
vitæ; but for Owen the suggestion would be laughable. He was one of the sweetest men I ever
knew, and one of Nature’s aristocrats.
I use the past tense verbs because to our great sadness Owen Roberts
died a very short time after our visit with him.

Owen Roberts and his wife, Ann Clwyd, M.P. with old friend, September 2012

Among
the most striking sentences of the striking Anglican burial service is this
one: “In the midst of life we are in death.” There can be no human heart that is deaf to the import of
that sentence, but it takes on an augmented poignancy when you reach the age at
which your contemporaries begin to vanish. Virgil summarizes the whole tragic sense of ending with
three haunting words: Sunt lacrimæ rerum—there
are indeed tears in things. But this is where the miracle-child
Ruby Dixon Fleming comes in. “When
a woman is giving birth, she has sorrow because her hour has come,” writes
Saint John the Evangelist, “but when she has delivered the baby, she no longer
remembers the anguish, for joy that a human being has been born into the
world.” In the midst of life, we are also in life.

2 comments:

I'm so sorry for the loss of your friend, but happy for you that you got in one last visit.

I like to think about the opposing view -- "In the midst of death, we are in life". I lost my beloved father on June 12 of this year, and then on July 4 my grand-niece, who would have been his first great grandchild, was born. But it's true, the death of a significant loved one does color life and remind us of the temporary nature of this world.

Would it be wrong of me to find my excitement at being described as the Christmas chef who cooked "the perfect turkey" in a recent post were to be slightly diminished by your claim to yourself have cooked "the perfect Thanksgiving turkey" in this one? Or may I assume that the perfection of a bird so described in December supersedes that of one written about in November?

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About Me

John V. Fleming, the Louis W. Fairchild Professor of Literature emeritus at Princeton University, retired after a long teaching career in 2006. He and his wife Joan continue to live in Princeton. The Flemings have three adult children, six delightful grandchildren, and lives that mysteriously continue to be busy.
He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu.